Tony Burke leaves door open to budget blocking

The federal opposition finance spokesman,
Tony Burke
, has not ruled out Labor trying to block some of the Abbott government’s revenue measures in Tuesday’s budget and says Treasurer
Joe Hockey
must take some responsibility for the deficit blowing out to $123 billion.

Speaking on the Nine Network’s Financial Review Sunday show, Mr Burke also said the Coalition’s proposal to freeze the pay of politicians would be of little comfort to most Australian families who would be hit the hardest by the federal budget on Tuesday.

“We will support the measure but I don’t think any one realistically would believe that this means
Tony Abbott
will be feeling the sort of pain that he is going to be inflicting on other Australians," he told the program.

“By all means, there will be a few moments in history when people focus on the impact on members of parliament, but the real pain here is going to be on families."

His comments came after Mr Hockey told Channel Nine journalist Laurie Oakes that the government planned to spend $80 billion on new roads over the next six years and had inherited $123 billion of debt because of Labor.

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Mr Burke said Mr Hockey was to blame for much of that debt. “More than half of that was put there by him," he said.

“That dollar amount includes all the taxation measures he threw away; it includes all of the money he sent to the Reserve Bank and it includes all of the parameter variations he made."

Mr Burke said Mr Hockey was “manufacturing a crisis" and said the Treasurer’s removal of a 2 per cent cap on expenditure growth was to blame for causing government spending to get out of control.

“If you remove the cap on spending growth of course spending goes up," he said. “That cap was there, though, when Labor was in office. It should have been kept. It was a mistake of epic proportions and it is part of the way that Joe Hockey has ended up with projections that show massive increases in expenditure. If you cap it those increases cannot happen."

‘Biggest increase in roads expenditure’

Earlier on the Nine Network’s Weekend Today program, Mr Hockey revealed that this week’s budget would include a plan for “the biggest increase in roads expenditure in Australian history".

Mr Hockey said: “Over the next six years, the Australian government in partnership with the states and the private sector is going to spend over $80 billion on new roads construction – that is tens of thousands of new jobs."

He said this budget would be a growth and building budget that asked all Australians to make a contribution.

Mr Burke said he expected Tuesday’s budget to be full of broken promises, but he refused to say what proposals Labor was likely to try to block in Parliament.

“There are very few measures at the moment that they have been talking about that actually check out against the promises they made before the election," he said. “In particular, the promises of no new taxes and the promise from Tony Abbott right up until the day before when he was saying there’d be no cuts to health, no cuts to education and no changes to [the age] pension."